By Design - Jayne Denker
Chapter 1
A hand snaked toward her from her left. Emmie Brewster’s eyes never strayed from the television, but her peripheral vision caught the movement. “You jonesing to make a stub the newest fashion accessory?”
“I was just wondering about that last Tootsie Roll you got there...”
Emmie sighed and glanced over at her best friend, Trish, who batted her eyelashes coquettishly. Emmie heaved herself forward toward the coffee table, seized the candy, unwrapped it, and bit it in half.
“Here,” she said, handing the bitten piece to her friend.
“Danke.” Her jaw working diligently, Trish said around the lump of candy, “Ee sool wowt, oo no?”
Emmie sighed. “Yeah, we should go out. Beautiful day, blah blah. But I’m, you know, busy.”
Trish swallowed and said more clearly, “Watching design shows? Seriously?”
“It’s educational.”
“Oh, please! You do this for a living! What in the world could you possibly learn from them?”
“Not to use pea green spray paint to renovate an old lamp, for one thing. Ew!”
Emmie tucked her right toe into the cuff of her left sock and scratched her itchy ankle.
“Those socks again?” Trish muttered without looking over at her friend. “Will you throw them the heck out, please?”
“No! They...” Emmie searched for a reason not to. “They have kitties on them.”
“I’ll draw kitties on your feet for you. Just get rid of the damned socks!”
“No!”
Trish pounced on the socks, yanking them off Emmie’s feet before she could react. “They’re going out!”
“NO!”
Trish disappeared into the kitchen. Emmie raced after her, but she was too late. She swung around the doorjamb just in time to hear the hum and growl of the trash compactor as it mashed her socks into last night’s potato peelings.
“You suck.”
“Emmie, my darling,” Trish said, leaning her long and narrow frame along the counter, “there’s something you’ve never understood about life. If you don’t like something, don’t put up with it—throw it out!”
Emmie had a funny feeling they weren’t talking about her socks anymore.
Sure enough, Trish asked, “Did you hear from him this weekend?” She had one eyebrow cocked suspiciously; she already knew the answer.
Emmie looked down at her bare feet on the yellow and blue linoleum. “No.”
“Even though he knows about today?”
Reluctantly, she murmured, “Yeah.”
“So...” Trish prompted.
“What?”
“Throw it out.”
And Trish reached over to the refrigerator, plucked a photo of Emmie and her erstwhile boyfriend, Kyle, out from under a ladybug magnet, and shoved it down the sink drain. She flipped on the water and flicked the switch for the disposal.
“Are you trying to destroy all my kitchen appliances one by one, or was that just easier than finding a pair of scissors?” Emmie shouted over the din.
“It’s more dramatic. Never underestimate the value of good drama,” Trish shouted back. She turned off the disposal and studied her friend. “You know what your trouble is?”
Emmie winced. Nothing good ever came after you know what your trouble is.
“You’re too safe. Too quiet. You’ve got your comfy little job—”
“Which keeps me in kibble.”
“And your comfy little house—”
“You like my comfy little house.”
“And your comfy little life. And nothing much moves.”
“I thought that was a good thing.”
“Yeah—when you’re eighty.”
“You calling me an old lady?” Emmie demanded. Trish smirked. “Hey, at least I don’t have cats.”
“First kitty socks, then real kitties. It just follows. I’d be worried if I were you.”
“Yeah, well, looks like someone else has ‘adventuring’ covered.” Emmie fished out a colorful postcard from her pile of mail and catalogs on the counter handed it to her friend.
Trish turned it over and winced. According to the postcard, Emmie’s father was in the middle of a “fantastic” vacation in Saint Lucia.
“Hm. I was going to ask how he’s holding up.”
“Oh, just fine, apparently. My dad used to be the kind of guy who thought that Saint Lucia was in Italy. Now look at him.” She gestured at the postcard with disgust.
“People grieve in different ways, sweetie.”
“I don’t think he grieved at all.”
“Oh, come on, that’s not fair. He was so broken up when your mom died. I remember.”
“Yeah,” Emmie admitted reluctantly.
He had been in shock for quite a while; when you’d been married for thirty-five years, she reasoned, it must be tough to suddenly be without that person who’d been by your side for so long.
Especially because her parents’ marriage was about as ideal as one could get. Oh, not because they’d never had their differences. Of course they had. But they’d always seemed to be in sync with one another, always engaged in a balanced, give-and-take dance. When one pushed, the other gave way to make